Month: July 2015

You might think it’s a no-brainer to talk to your neighbors about your street. Well, after a year of living here, we have, and been informed that local slumlords, owning at least 19 homes in the area, ten of them on Pleasant Ave., Herkimer, make tidy incomes from HUD’s subsidized Section 8 housing vouchers program. The landlords are paid directly by the county housing authority. Though required to maintain their Section 8 properties in compliance with HUD Section 8 housing performance standards, you’ll often find these homes in disrepair both outside and inside, in direct violation of HUD requirements and Herkimer zoning codes

On Herkimer’s Pleasant Avenue, you’ll find some of it renters, both Section 8 and private, have criminal histories, abuse drugs and their children and traffic drugs. This unwitting but successful connivance between Herkimer’s slumlords and drug traffickers has emboldened the Pleasant Avenue’s criminals with a sense of ownership of street and created a menacing sense of anarchy for homeowners. And made Pleasant Avenue a sanctuary for criminals, a Mohawk Valley pirate hole. But it’s only succeeded because of a silent third party, the Village of Herkimer, whose failure of governance is seen through the condition of the street’s rental properties and its lackadaisical policing. Pleasant Avenue’s volatile mix of besieged homeowners and low-income renters can only become a peaceful, if uneasy one with a regular and effective police presence.

All residents must realize that private property means private. My driveway is not your play area. Streets are for automobiles and not ballgames and boisterous gatherings. There are many games that can be played on the grass in backyards: basketball, badminton, volleyball and croquet. Reading books aloud can be fun, too. You’ll find it cooler and safer in your own backyards. Hint – Most children play in the backyard or at a school yard, and not in the middle of the street, especially for hours on end, in front of the homes of people their parents don’t like.

The appalling, dangerous and unpleasant traditions that have been allowed to develop here on Pleasant Avenue in Herkimer over the last 4 years are at odds with neighborhood safety. We are entitled to the same and peaceful and quiet enjoyment of our homes as the rest of the rest of the Village of Herkimer enjoys. We pay taxes for municipal and state services. We expect street brawls, disorderly conduct and harassment and mob menacing to be nonexistent or immediately squelched by a prompt, firm and consistent police response.

Herkimer is truly one of the most beautiful places to live anywhere. But it’s important to feel that all of our community is safe and that residents respect each other rights. For this to happen, we have our work cut out.

There have been wheat and corn shortages, chocolate and coffee shortages and, amazingly for us here in the Northeast, even egg shortages. Food shortages in Venezuela are an example of how catastrophic such conditions can become.

One clear example of the effects of a changing climate on food production is the prolonged drought in California’s Central Valley. It’s resulted in a loss of 5 percent of irrigated cropland, or $800 million in crop revenue, according to UC Davis. Central Valley has long been renowned for its abundant harvests of apricots, asparagus, almonds, cotton, tomatoes and grapes.

Another widespread loss is in eggs. The US used to export about 30 million eggs per day. Now we’re importing eggs to cover shortages resulting from Bird Flu. Our nationwide production is down by 28 million eggs per day.

Let’s face it – Living in Herkimer, a veritable agricultural Garden of Eden, we should not have food shortages. Our fertile soil, abundant farmland and wealth of water resources are what first attracted settlers to the flats along the Mohawk, and have sustained our farm families for generations. We should be able to provide bountiful food locally for everyone and at a lower cost because it is grown here. There’s no necessity to import produce that can be locally grown from California or Florida. And soon, probably impossible, given the toll climate is taking on crop yields in formerly abundant agricultural regions. We need to begin cultivating our own food self-sufficiency now, in the thousands of fertile acres that abound in Herkimer and the Mohawk Valley. We’ll have fresher food that requires less energy to grow and distribute.

We can expand our expertise to include fish farming, and we can grow our crops all year long in such inexpensive structures as hoop houses that provide the warm sunlit environment plants need. We can try aquaponics and hydroponics for high density, organic indoor farming.

Community farming can be the opportunity we need to teach vital sustainability skills to our children even as we grow our farms to protect us from disaster by providing food security. Working together for the benefit of all also teaches us the social skills we need to foster a genuine, sustainable community. We might also petition our mayor to let us have chickens and a goat or two, even if we live within Herkimer Village.

Always keep in mind that just because you’re one person, you’re not incapable of making important changes. By growing your own food and joining others in making our community a sustainable one, you can make our planet healthier while bringing food security to your home and neighborhood.

There’s a whole family of such mind control drugs. Words associated with them include zombie, puppet, loss of will, memory loss. They’ve been used for decades by Central and South Americans to harvest a cash crop from the unwitting, victims who conveniently forget everything, a side effect of these zombie drugs. If you’re a victim who survives such a mind rape, you’ll have no memory of it. Your assailants will be free to move on to their next victim without fear of exposure, and without the inconvenience of a dead body or a missing person’s report.

Scopolamine
Inexpensive and easily produced, Scopolamine, also called Devil’s Breath, is one of the most common in this family of mind control drugs. It’s often called the zombie drug. Some will tell you it’s difficult to get hold of. Not true—scopolamine is derived from a plant called Datura. It grows abundantly in the wild. In Upstate New York and the Herkimer area, it’s known as Jimson Weed and is found throughout the region, especially in the Mohawk Valley’s fertile river lands.

Dangers of Scopolamine
While many of those who take Scopolamine are unwitting victims, some take it for its hallucinogenic and euphoric effects. Don’t be fooled. This is a sinister drug which can result in death. It is a member of the deadly nightshade family.

Misuse Overloaded
Some people give this dangerous mind control drug to their children to keep them quiet and manageable, especially kids who tend to act out and have other behavior issues. Others, including trusted friends and relatives, administer such zombie drugs as Scopolamine to manipulate children for sex, either with themselves and friends, or for their pedophile clients. As we know from news reports, there’s a brisk, well-paying business in pimping out children to pedophiles, who are drawn from every socioeconomic group.

Telltale Signs of Scopolamine Controlled Children
Look for abnormally quiet behavior, especially in a group of kids–it’s behavior that’s almost sinisterly quiet. Obvious and significant memory loss is another warning sign. Additional behavior to be alert for is any which looks out of the norm for typical human interaction, such as in group play. We all have normal patterns of behavior, and when these change significantly, we should ask why. Don’t take this drug or give it to anyone else. If your children are acting strangely try to understand rather than ignore these changes.

In this story you’ll discover how a malicious, well-executed kick transformed the acts of a neighbor recycling stuff on her own property into an act of larceny as defined by officer Haight of the Herkimer Police Department.

On July 15th at approximately 9:21 PM, I was placing a few items in the recycle bin that I keep outside in my driveway here in the Village of Herkimer. As I was finishing up and about to return to the house, something struck the back of my legs. I turned around to find a soccer ball at my feet.

I picked the ball up and approached my house. Nearby voices in the dark called for its return. As with many parents whose children do something they shouldn’t, I refused to hand the ball over. My driveway is very narrow and virtually inaccessible to normal ballplayers; the ball could only have entered it if had been kicked from across the street, not down it. It was obviously part of an ongoing and escalating pattern of harassment directed against my husband and I. Some neighbors strongly opposed our driveway security camera that records the stream of nighttime traffic. The Bartons of 333 Pleasant Avenue, who a regional DEA agent referred to in a phone conversation as “the porch people” were especially outraged by this camera presence.

Officer Haight said our neighbors, Douglas and Joyce Barton, had reported us for taking their ball and demanded to know if this was true. I admitted I’d taken their ball and explained why. Officer Haight was unmoved by my explanation and advised that if our neighbor wished to press charges, he’d “have no choice” but to enforce the law regarding larceny. The threat of arrest hung heavy in the night air. He expressed his opinion that we were in the midst of an ongoing feud with our neighbors. (We are, in the sense that the Allies were feuding with Nazi Germany.)

Officer Haight confessed ignorance of any of the multiple acts of vandalism, mob menacing and break-ins we’ve suffered over the past year, at least one orchestrated by the Bartons. I was thus accused of victimizing the Bartons by withholding their ball, which had just been used to assault me.

Officer Haight demanded to know the ball’s location. My husband said it had migrated to an adjacent empty yard. Officer Haight’s supervisor then arrived and the two went off to fetch the ball for the Bartons, who were consumed with mirth as they lounged watching from their porch at 333 Pleasant Avenue. The Herkimer police officers respectfully returned the ball to the Bartons and departed – our harassers were treated with deference while we were disdained.

2. Only afterwards did I discover this is a typical ploy used by thugs to harass and intimidate their neighbors, sometimes aided by allied police officers illegally acting under the color of law. The object is to have a victim cited and fined for petty larceny by police, hoping that the neighbor then won’t complain when the thugs trespass on their property to stash contraband, vandalize it, menace them or disturb the peace. It’s the dim mindset of social parasites who spent their brief school years in behavior remediation classes. The remedy, according to attorneys, is to demonstrate harassment by keeping security cameras on the street. This we will do. (Probably not the outcome our neighbors desired. )

I was dumbfounded that Officer Haight attempted to characterize my removing the ball with which I’d been assaulted as an act of larceny, when it was clearly an act of self-defense. He seemed ignorant that a condition of larceny is that there be an intent to steal. My intent was:
1. to place my recyclables in my bin and return inside to watch True Detective;
2. To avoid being ridiculed by neighbors and hit with their expertly aimed balls;
3. To avoid having neighbors continue to trespass on my property.

I never play ball. I spend my time hiking, writing and mending the myriad of worn out portions of my dilapidated and ancient (yet adorable ) Herkimer Village home.

In the past year due to neighbor trespass, break-ins and vandalism, we’ve had to expend resources on security systems and cameras, rather than on our home’s aging infrastructure.

My husband and I have been so undeserved by the Herkimer Village police that it borders on depraved indifference. Notably,
1. a direct statement by a Herkimer Village police officer that that there’s no New York State law restricting the gathering of a menacing mob of 30—40 in front of one’s home, and that the police aren’t required to disperse such a belligerent gathering. And of course,
2. The unblushing statement by a Herkimer police officer that I appeared to be guilty of larceny because I removed an old ball with which I’d been deliberately struck while putting out the recyclables at a bin in my driveway. (To be larceny the property “must have been lost or mislaid…or delivered under a mistake.” As it was used in assault, it wasn’t delivered under a mistake but deliberately and with intent to harass and harm.)

Police who aid and abet the victimization of peaceful retirees by neighbors who act criminally, and make ill-informed, self-serving and egregious statements, are at the very least in need of remedial training.